This American Life - 140: Family Business

Broadcast on: 24 Sep 1999

From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, this is American life, and I'm out of glass. - And this is the story of the day that my dad fired his mother and sent her home from work. With her 13-inch black and white TV in the passenger seat, you know, like as if a sure sign that she was definitely not coming back, she was taking the TV with her.

- There are two kinds of family stories, your tragedies and your comedies. This you'll be glad to hear is a comedy. When Rory was growing up in Massachusetts, everybody in the family did some work for the family business, a machine shop. She and her sisters assembled tiny parts, as kids at the kitchen table. Her grandfather ran the technical side, her dad ran the business side. - And my grandmother, my father's mother, was the secretary in the shop. She sat in the front with my father, like right outside his office, and he couldn't stand, basically, that she always gave him what he calls chin music, which is she would always be like, "Why are you paying that person that amount of money, "or why are you lending that person that money?" Or it was always about money, it was always about like the business affairs of the shop that she felt like she had to say something and that drove him bats.

So, one day, I guess he had asked her to order a bunch of liquor for a party. I think it was like a wintertime party, possibly a Christmas party. And it was a list of all the liquor that they needed to get. And she thought that there was too much gin on the list. She thought that gin was a summer drink, despite the fact that she doesn't drink. And so she said to my father, like don't you think that that's too much gin, you should order something else, or don't get that drink. And he said, like, no, we're gonna get that, just order what I wanted. And she sort of went at him again, I think. And then as she says, like it just like grew into something much uglier. And it was basically that he, I guess basically he was just through in her face

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